“There is grandeur in this view of life,” concludes Charles Darwin in his opus “On the Origin of Species.” “… From so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” Darwin was right about many things, including the mechanism by which the plenitude of life we know as biodiversity came to thrive on this planet. Unfortunately for us, his picture of a continuously rich congregation of interacting species has hit a big roadblock.

New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert lays out the situation in “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.” The activities of Homo sapiens – that’s right, us – are reducing the volume and kinds of other life-forms on the planet at a rate and magnitude that earn our moment in time its own epochal designation. By 2016, it is expected that the inherently conservative Geological Society of London will make it official: We’re living in an Anthropocene of our own devising.

In her elegant and quickly paced book, Kolbert reviews the history of the very concept of extinction, noting that neither Aristotle nor Pliny nor Linnaeus ever guessed there had been life-forms on Earth that no longer exist.

Georges Cuvier, the French naturalist who once compared notes on mastodon teeth withThomas Jefferson, concluded that a variety of unearthed gigantic skeletal remains belonged to a “primitive earth,” and that a succession of catastrophes had caused these former realities to disappear.

With a significant assist from Charles Lyell, who posited that slow geological processes had created the present landscape, Darwin himself helped establish extinction as a fundamental factor in shaping life. His theory of evolution by natural selection pointed to a branching system of new life-forms made possible in part by the exiting of some older ones.

Kolbert’s riveting narrative follows the excitement, the controversies and the long slogs by which theories about how extinction operates have come to be widely accepted.

“What is sometimes labeled neocatastrophism,” she writes, “but is mostly nowadays just regarded as standard geology holds that conditions of life change only very slowly, except when they don’t.” There is slow extinction and there is fast extinction, as with the asteroid event first proposed by UC Berkeley geologist Walter Alvarez to explain the initiating cause of death at the end of the Cretaceous, one of the five major extinctions that have outlined Earth history. Today, Alvarez notes an even more mind-boggling cause for massive loss of life. “We’re seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.”

How do we add this up, how does science today make this claim? “It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion.”

Getting into the details, Kolbert takes her reader on a tour of extinctions around the globe. She covers ocean acidification, which gravely threatens the calcifying creatures that form a foundational part of the marine ecosystem. In the Andes, she accompanies researchers who are tracking species on the move in response to changing temperature and precipitation patterns brought on by the atmospheric effects of fossil fuel emissions. As the trees move, so shift the relationships among species who live with them. Insects and birds that pollinate and disperse seeds are becoming disconnected from the ecological alliances evolution has gradually wrought between them.

In the United States, Kolbert gingerly picks her way through carpets of bat carcasses, casualties of a runaway fungal infection. She points out that habitat fragmentation and invasive species, both the result of human alterations on the landscape, hasten the simplifying of ecosystems.

It is not possible to overstate the importance of Kolbert’s book. Her prose is lucid, accessible and even entertaining as she reveals the dark theater playing out on our globe. It is enough for one book to cover the enormous swaths of scientific territory she does here. Still, I would have liked more reference and explanation of how this accelerated take-down of creatures causes even more negative effects than the immediate one of species loss.

For example, here in North America, the loss of top predators (grizzly bears and wolves) exacerbates our current ecological woes. On the East Coast, superabundant deer are decimating forests and in some communities have to be culled by hunters. These deer also bring us proliferating ticks and Lyme disease. In the West, the lack of big teeth on the landscape actually has an impact on the water system, since the over-browsing deer and elk erode the banks of creeks and rivers, and pave the way for invasive plants to further degrade nature’s operations there.

Finally, while there is probably no hope for many of the Earth’s creatures no matter what we do right now, we certainly can stem this extinction crisis. With any hope, Kolbert’s readers will not be able to sleep until we all do our part to protect habitat for our co-travelers through what Darwin rightly called Earth’s grandeur. As climate change forces species to adjust how and where they live, we can help them by protecting enough natural places for them to do so.

This review appears in The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, February 9, 2014.

One of the reasons I’m slightly obsessed with botanic gardens is that the earliest impulse to create them integrated science and religion within their leafy bowers. The 16th century monks who planned and planted Europe’s first botanic gardens did so as an act of devotion to God. They collected seeds and specimens from all over the world in an attempt to recreate the original botanic garden – Eden.

The idea was that after the Fall, Eden had disappeared to some far flung location, and expeditions were sent to go find it. The alternate thinking was that Eden had been flung asunder, its treasures distributed all over the world, and again, explorers were sent to go find those pieces and bring them home. Planting botanic gardens meant putting the pieces back together again in homage to a Creator. And in collecting plants found in different locations, growing in varying soil types and climates, the puzzles of biogeography began to be addressed. Who lives where and how they got there continue to be important scientific questions today.

Our world, at least in the United States, is a far more secular place than Europe in the middle ages. But many of us have an intuition that those monks were onto something.

The idea of an original, whole nature, is an abiding desire. We know that global change is having negative and potentially disastrous effects on species and their habitats, but this bad news often feels like it is coming from far away. We want to help nature by reducing our carbon footprints, but many of us have to get into cars every day, to go to work, to drive our kids to soccer practice.

How can we connect ourselves back to the green heart of life, how can we take direct sustenance from the procreative powers of nature, and how can we help heal the fractures in our imperfect world?

Well, in many American cities, we can start by taking the bus to our botanic gardens. I live in San Francisco, so for me this means a jaunt to Golden Gate Park, accessible by multiple public transportation options, and abetted by a free shuttle inside the park. I usually ride my bike, which truth be told, is often just as fast as the bus. Either way, within a half hour I’m ensconced in a truly beautiful collaboration between man and nature. San Francisco Botanic Garden (SFBG) is organized mostly by geographic region, so a stroll through its various gardens can be a bit of an academic exercise, if you’re so inclined. Our New Zealand, Native Plants, and Chilean Gardens all display the glories of what is known as a mediterranean climate, with cool, dry summers and wet winters. Other people will preference SFBG’s world-class magnolia collection or redwood forest, but my absolute favorite is the Ancient Plants Garden. Walking among these crazy sci-fi trees and vines, the ancestors of today’s plant life, I feel the sense of a green pathway back into the mists of time.

One way to consider the network of arteries that extend from the Garden’s green heart to points all around the city and beyond is the birds-eye view. Many of the birds who tarry feasting on the Garden’s perpetual blooms also venture well past its boundaries, carrying nectar and seeds to little patches of greenery all over town. Even planted meridians on busy roadways provide pieces of habitat connectivity for birds, butterflies, and other bugs looking for food and a place to rest. San Francisco is on the Pacific flyway, and is a productive stopover for birds on their way North or South, depending on the species and the time of year. Watching birds come and go I like to think of them stitching up the distances between far-flung geographies and thus creating one continuous fabric of life. Other locations have their own stories, and one of the great pleasures of living in a place is investigating who else, besides humans, uses it.Because nature is in fact going on everywhere, even across big cities.

Most American botanic gardens have traditionally showcased the glories of plant breeding to create bigger, showier, or more exotic flowers. Today botanical gardens have become home for many species that are threatened or endangered in the wild.

For more than ten years, scientists have documented species shifting where they live in response to warming temperatures and changing precipitation patterns. Plants and animals that are no longer able to thrive in the climates where we have historically found them are on the move. But they haven’t settled into new homes yet – and since temperatures keep rising, it is likely that not all of them will ever find suitable dwelling again. Botanic gardens are important safe houses for many of the world’s most delicate species, providing a comfort zone while the “new normal” asserts itself.

Botanic gardens today are in a position to play a central role in educating people about nature, and in providing access to its beauties. Botanic gardens are connected with each other through organizations like the American Public Gardens Association, and as an active professional network are perfectly positioned to bring a big, unified message to the public about the centrality of nature in all of our lives. Botanic gardens already exist, and they already have devoted corps of volunteers who help to keep them running. What they need is more public support, and more visits from the people who live around them. The San Francisco Botanic Garden is currently raising funds for a sustainability center that will help involve and educate our populace about how plants grow and how biodiversity works. And when the learning is done, we’ll be able to step into the Eden at the heart of Golden Gate Park, and enjoy the world as a unified creation once again.

I wrote this piece for Richard Louv’s Childrenandnature.org site, which is rich with thought and material. The photo above is taken by Saxon Holt at the San Francisco Botanic Garden — he’s likewise a wonderful photographer.

Climate change provokes not just water rising up over our heads but emotional flooding as well. If I had heard only William Collins and Chris Field at the 2013 Philomathia Forum on “Water, Climate, and Society,” last week, I would probably have gone out and bought a Barcalounger and tried to develop a taste for beer and whatever is on television. Because: Good God! Collins heads the Climate Science Department at the Berkeley Lab, and Chris Field is founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology. Both made major contributions to the 2014 International Panel on Climate Change’s upcoming report, which summarizes the state of our knowledge for darned sure about what is happening – I want to say, “out there,” but that doesn’t do it. Climate change is everywhere: it’s in the water.

In sum, in addition to the usual flooding and droughts you’ve heard about, we can look forward to massive starvation in undeveloped countries, increased violence (people fight more when it’s hotter, and they will have more basic things to fight about, like water) and widespread forced migrations. Subsequent speakers laid out the big water problems we have closer to home, mainly that our water capture and delivery systems were developed for a hydrological cycle that warming temperatures has irrevocably altered. Here in San Francisco, we’re going to have to figure out another way to turn on the tap, because the snowmelt we depend on from the Sierras is not going to be there anymore.

The moderator asked his own question of Field and Collins: “is there such a thing as too much information”? This got a sort of laugh, but I knew what he meant. How do we sort through this fire hose barrage of bad causes and bad effects to formulate an actionable intention?

Luckily, we also heard from Antonio Villaraigosa, Mayor of Los Angeles from 2005 to 2013 who told us how he set his intention to clean up Los Angeles water and air and the Port of Los Angeles, and how he did it: with multiple partnerships, and “not without push back.” Lisa Jackson, until recently the Administrator of EPA (she’s come west to Apple) addressed a current debate about the usefulness of a humanities-oriented education when there’s so much practical work to be done. An engineer by training, Jackson said “one of the most important things about being an engineer is that you learn to state the problem. That’s huge.” But she boosted the softer subjects as well, like social sciences, “because we have to understand how people make decisions and do things if we are going to fix these problems.”

Claire Kremens from UC Berkeley gave a pithy drill-down on the bass-ackwards way we do agriculture, recounting the perverse returns of 1.3 billion chronically hungry people and 800 million obese people at opposite ends of a falsely propped up food system. Which incidentally also wreaks environmental degradation. Like the vested interests Villaraigosa referenced, industrial agriculture is holding fast to the methods of its poisonous assault. But these are issues we can choose to fight at the supermarket. Or at the farmer’s market.

A very useful addendum to this forum was its concluding panel, a group of journalism grad students from Berkeley, who both suggested story ideas they had gleaned from the day, and also gave the scientists some feedback on their presentations. My favorite: “Your power points are horrible. If people have to think about what they mean, they don’t work.” As one who often stares bewildered at scientists’ power points, I was gratified.

On another water note, Kenyon Fields, executive director of the Western Landowners Alliance, was telling me that water issues are serving a really useful purpose in the ranching precincts of the west where the phrase “climate change” gets you a kick out the door. “They won’t talk about the whole thing, but they will talk about water, because they are feeling the change already. In their lifetimes, they have never seen anything like what’s happening to their land.” Since ranchers need to adapt to stay in business, they are confronting truths about perverse water incentives and the other layers of encrusted bureaucracy that get in the way of reforming our relationship with water. Since healthy grazing practices, as enumerated by Kremens, naturally conserve water, ranchers can turn themselves into everybody’s best friend. And they’d better, because as was reiterated several times at the forum, we can replace fossil fuels, but there is no replacement for water.

Yes, despair that our federal government is doing nothing about the greatest threat to mankind’s physical and moral well-being since Satan tempted a certain savior in the desert. But rejoice, cities are on the case. For example, San Francisco, which likes to turn a bad trip into a good party: http://www.sfenvironment.org/event/san-francisco-green-festival

I hated that Kubrick movie but I love the title. It’s pretty apt for what this government paroxysm is doing to science all over the world. Take stalled scientific expeditions to Antarctica, where expensive instruments tuned to the pulses of melting ice caps stand in danger of going unmonitored this year. This doesn’t represent just the waste of hundreds of hours of preparation and analysis. If the instruments aren’t repaired and tended to this year, they are likely to be lost in the snowy depths and rendered useless. Because the research is federally funded, it’s on ice, as it were.

In Point Reyes, California, researchers from world-renowned Point Blue Conservation Science are caught at an ornithological impasse. Formerly known as the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, this organization has been collecting data on songbirds since 1966. That’s 46 years of how many of which species are tweeting when and where, how well they are reproducing and how well they are surviving. In the world of natural science, long data sets are extremely rare. Until relatively recently, even if researchers had the ambition to collect the painstaking records that reveal the life histories of species, they weren’t able to easily collect it. Mobile technology, sophisticated statistical programming, and massive computing power have put Big Data at center stage in biodiversity studies.

Point Blue has been at the forefront of this revolution and this year is the second they have deployed sophisticated miniature geolocator tabs to track birds that pass through Point Reyes. “It’s pretty much changed our lives,” says Tom Gardali of Point Blue’s Palomarin Field Station. “Before the geolocators, we didn’t really know where the birds went. Now we do.” Monitoring Swainson’s thrushes, Gardali and his team have discovered that after wintering here they go to western Mexico near Puerta Vallarta (of course they do). “This is incredibly important to conservation,” he explains. “Now we know that this landscape is connected to that landscape.”

On the other hand, Golden Crowned sparrows that find Point Reyes to be their idea of a winter vacation go to Alaska to breed. “The amazing thing is that they spread out rather drastically,” Gardali says, the wonder of it all evident in his voice. “They break up and go to different spots along a 1300 km stretch of Alaskan coast. That ties our little West Marin place here with a vast geography.” Most of the shore line of North America is connected through these birds, conjoined at the special locus of Point Reyes.

The birds are following an ancient schedule that operates regardless of the bullies holding fast to their pulpit. Because Point Reyes is a National Seashore, Gardali and his team are forbidden from counting up the Crowned sparrows that are currently migrating here. If they fly through without being noted, the expense in both time and dollars of the fancy geolocators will be wasted. The loss of this year’s data degrades the effort and achievement of the 46 years of data that come before it. The utility of long term monitoring is that it shows change happening at the scale at which it occurs – at a huge scale over many years and many miles. Take an arbitrary bite out of that and you thwack the big picture.

As if the insult to the vital increase of basic knowledge weren’t enough, consider the repercussions of the shut down on volunteers. Not only are the government researchers prevented from doing their work, so are scores of volunteers who help them do it. The Gulf of the Farallones Marine Sanctuary has for 20 years run a Beach Watch monitoring program. Since 1993 more than 100 highly trained citizen scientists have helped notify the Office of Spill Prevention and Response about signs that an oil pollution event is underway. Beach Watch volunteers undergo a rigorous 80-hour training before being assigned one of 41 beach segments in the Bay Area to inventory every two to four weeks, taking meticulous note of both live and dead birds and mammals, and documenting oil tarballs. Beach Watch volunteers are amazingly dedicated and consistent. This January, assuming we have a functioning government, 15 Beach Watch veterans who have been on the job for 20 years each will be honored by the Sanctuary.

Although they don’t get paid, Beach Watch volunteers are covered by worker’s compensation insurance provided by the federal government – and of course, that is suspended at the moment. Volunteers have been enjoined to not go out to monitor transects. What this means is that 20 years of consistent data on the state and health of our beaches – which reflect the status of seabirds and marine mammals – will have a big lacuna in it. This could have a negative impact on future litigation and settlements regarding oil spills and the damage they do to our wildlife, to the health of our ecosystems, to our commercial and recreational experiences on the shore.

The shut-down of Beach Watch also comes at the time of year known informally as “oil spill season.” Annual current changes bring tarballs from naturally occurring oil seeps along the shores of central and southern California up North. Winter storms jar the sunken ships that liberally populate our sea floor – many of these went down with fuel aboard. And of course, there’s the stormy challenge to the constant shipping traffic through San Francisco Bay. It’s not if there will be another oil event here, it’s when. But without Beach Watch volunteers monitoring the shores for signs of stressed wildlife and tarballs, knowledge of these events will be delayed, and so will the subsequent response.

Timing is everything in nature, and the monitoring of sea life is particularly important now, at the end of the breeding season. A high level of bird mortality this time of year reflects the huge effort it takes older birds to fledge the next generation. Young birds that don’t make it through the ultimate hazing of survival, the challenges faced by their species for millennia, also die in higher numbers this time of year. The least we owe these sojourners is to witness and note the termination of their existence, intimately tied with our own. And without full information documented in standardized surveys, we can’t know whether the dead birds on the beach are part of the average fall-out in the struggle for existence, or if they indicate a larger pollution or other human-caused event.

Citizen scientists in general don’t have PhDs. What they do have is the status, the responsibilities, and the rights that define members of our body politic. The government shut-down perversely prevents people from fulfilling their roles as citizens? It voids the heroic commitment of regular people who devote thousands upon thousands of hours each year to helping safeguard our natural capital. It erases critical links in irreplaceable data sets going back into time. Stanley Kubrick was trying to get at a lie of the mind Homo sapiens are all too good at telling. Self-interest occludes what is right, even what is desperately, vitally right. We wring our hands; the birds fly overhead. Or die on the beach.

On Wednesday Allen Fish and I talk umwelt up at Hawk Hill. Fish is the director of the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory and commandante of its annual hawk watch – in which more than 300 volunteers cycle through shifts to daily count raptors commuting across the Golden Gate Bridge on their Southern migration. While Fish takes passionate exception to anyone who might characterize hawks as mystical, regal, majestic, transcendent, and so forth – “that’s all about us,” he says, “and thinking about the birds that way has never done them any good” – he nevertheless has quite the poetic side and it’s fun to muse on life’s big questions with him.

We didn’t exactly use the term umwelt, which has some pretty specific connotations in the world of semiotics, but which is also colloquially useful to describe the felt thisness of the world. Fish and I discuss how every generation has a sense of what nature is based on what’s there when they look at it. “Think about what this place looked like before the city was built, a couple of hundred years ago,” Fish says. We don’t know what’s been lost because we didn’t watch it go. “If we knew we’d probably weep.”

I started with Fish’s hawk watch last year as part of my research for a book I’m tentatively calling Citizen Scientist. (I may call it Citizen Science. Or maybe some variation of The Snake, the Seeker and the Smartphone, which Ken-Ichi Ueda came up with. Kibbitzing on this subject is most welcome.) So – although I’m watching for hawks, I’m also watching the watchers. With raptors, this gets deep, because these “birds of prey” are also constantly watching. In fact, one of my favorite sights is a gliding hawk with its head at a 90-degree angle to its body – a model of absolute focus on the ground and what little critter might be moving across it.

Hawkwatching is a crazy, cosmic, exhilarating, and exhausting activity. Wednesday we count more than 250 birds over about a six and a half hour period. Long stretches of time go by with no birds. Then someone calls out, “juvenile red-tail North,” and then there are four birds and then suddenly you are choosing to keep your binoculars on just one because sun is refracting through its wings and you can really see its thisness, the fact that it is yes a juvenile red-tail and not an adult red-shouldered, for example.

All last year I watched and wondered, why hawks? There are so many gorgeous birds out there, and no lack of bird-lovers, but the group at Hawk Hill are raptor-bent. Wednesday I slap myself on the head for ever asking this ridiculous question. Hawks most beautifully dart and glide and swoop and then shudder a moment, wings gathered then extended again. Ravens and crows do a fun dance but it isn’t as pretty. Hawks appear to be darning up the sky and making its fabric. That’s no mystical, regal, transcendent thought – it’s a biological observation. Hawks are top predators so have an outsized impact on the rest of the food chain. Most obviously, they keep rodent populations in check. They are sky-dwellers but their impact extends to the geological carbon cycle, which is created partly through food-web interactions, partly through the abiotic cycle of uplift and erosion that gives us ground. Hawks stitch earth and air together.

There’s a lot to see from Hawk Hill, including the peregrinations of fog over the water. Sunlight reflecting striated on the bay momentarily assumes a pattern that looks just like the orderly mottle of the hawk’s wings. “We have no trouble understanding that plants, animals, insects, birds, are all products of and reflect the environment,” Fish notes. “But we keep ourselves separate from that.” He laughs at the absurd disconnect. “We don’t understand that we look like we do and even think like we do because we’re part of the world, its evolution.” That’s umwelt for you.

If you are around tomorrow I’ll be giving a presentation on The Spine of the Continent at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California. Saturday, September 7 at 4 p.m. Free.

Effective communication about the environment, check. Inspiration to address threats to Earth processes, check. Community of like-minded people who want to help, check check check check.

The subtitle was: can tech save biodiversity? The members of the panel I moderated last night at the Commonwealth Club of California were Ken-ichi Ueda and Scott Loarie from iNaturalist.org, and Tanya Birch from Google Earth. With his black hair flopping around a yellow bandana, Ueda set the tone for the evening by talking about how he came to invent iNaturalist. A self-described nature nerd and computer geek, Ueda put two of his passions together to help connect people with the denizens of the great outdoors, and with each other. Utilizing a smartphone or combining a camera with a gps device, users make “observations” of insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, plants, birds, and fungi and associate these with a latitude and longitude, a date and a time. Uploaded to iNaturalist, they become part of a great inventory of nature. He described the satisfaction of looking for, and finding, creatures, and sharing these instances of attention, noticing, and communion with other nature lovers. He talked about the wonder of seeing three species of bird on a stretch of Market Street, then noticing a lone hawk perched above on an office tower; this vision, he said, gave him “solace.”

Of course I’m singing (or screaming) in the choir but I felt Ueda’s testimony was just the right sort of precursor to evoke receptivity in folks who otherwise may turn away from nature’s dire problems. (In upcoming weeks and months, expect even more terrible news about what’s happening to our planet – the 5th International Panel on Climate Change will start publishing reports, and well you know. It’s not good news.) Loarie pointed out that species are going extinct at a rate that is about 100 percent faster than the background extinction that is a part of time’s arrow. He mentioned that human beings use up 60 percent of the energy yielded by the sun – we are gobbling up far more than our share. Loarie is a scientist among whose relevant publications include The Velocity of Climate Change, and he knows a thing or two about why and how scientists use data about species to help figure out how to help them. iNaturalist is a tool the rest of us can use for fun, but when iNat’s expert verification system gives an observation its imprimatur, it gets uploaded to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, a vast database in use by scientists all over the world. An example of how iNaturalist can be used to more local effect is the Vermont Atlas of Life. What we need is for every region and state to establish similar projects.

Perhaps the central utility of technology is its ability to help reconcile the local and the global. Thus tribespeople in Brazil, armed with smartphones provided by Google Earth, are measuring the carbon sequestered in their ancestral forest to be valued in a carbon market. Illegal logging can be instantly reported and dealt with in short order. The story of the Surui was one inspiration from Tanya Birch; another was a project in Jane Goodall’s neck of the woods, where African chimpanzees are threatened with loss of their habitat. Birch talked about turning poachers into citizen scientists.

Many of us walk around knowing that our cushy Western life-style is a distinct part of the problem here. But it can feel impossible to do anything consequential about it. If you have to drive to work, you have to drive to work. Here’s something you can do: get an iNaturalist account (free). Go outside. Look for critters. And if you happen to be in the Bay Area, check out the rest of this month’s biodiversity programming at the Commonwealth Club, including my own presentation August 29. I have a nifty slide show.

Looking out over Coyote Valley, the built environment of San Jose is visible. I can see the literal outlines of “Silicon Valley”: buildings and “campuses” housing Genentech, IBM, AMD, Yahoo, etc. Measured by the billions of people who are virtually linked through just two of these behemoths, Google and Facebook, it’s fair to say this is the center of the world as we know it. The anthropocentric world, that is.

Behind me, the Santa Cruz Mountains. Over on the other side of the Valley, the Diablo Range. All is green right here but not exactly quiet. A fluttering curtain of birds accompanies a tractor as it churns the Earth. The birds are after the rousted insects. Bigger birds – more raptors hang out right here than anywhere else in California – make stealth forays after the smaller passerines.

Coyote Valley is recognized by many as essential to the continued health of the greater San Jose area, to Santa Clara County, indeed, to the health of central inland as well as coastal California. This one little piece of land, 7000 acres, is virtually the last relatively wild connection between mountain ranges. Much of it is agriculturally-purposed, but as the birds attest, the wildlife have made use of that. In turn, the birds of course keep pest populations in check, which benefits the farmers.

Walking along Coyote Creek, hawks fly overhead; animals without wing power have to find a way to get across bifurcating Highway 101, and indeed they do, using an underpass. Their treks have been captured by cameras operated by wildlife corridor technicians from nearby DeAnza Community College. Not only is this territory prime for allowing critters to keep on keeping on, it also provides an outdoor lab for students learning how nature works.

One of the reasons Silicon Valley has become such a popular locus for the technology revolution is that it is darn beautiful here. The weather is salubrious, perhaps too hot in the most intense part of summer, but mostly temperate. This is a place people want to live. It is one of the main tenants of conservation biology that keeping natural areas connected keeps all the works in motion. That means that the wilderness left here in Coyote Valley performs an outsized service in keeping San Jose/Sunnyvale/Santa Clara the highest performing metropolitan area in the United States (according to the Milken Institute). You would think armed guards would be on sentry to make sure a mountain lions passing from one range to another can do so without getting hit by a car.

The Santa Clara Open Space Authority, in purchasing about 350 acres of Coyote Valley, have protected a bit of it. Coyote Ridge, visible across Bailey Avenue, is doubly spared from development because it is too hard to build on, and because it is habitat for endangered species including the Bay checkerspot butterfly. Various municipal habitat plans protect Coyote Valley at least through 2040 – hopefully by that time, we will have learned to look at the landscape differently. Instead of seeing acres upon which to put housing development, we will see our own circulatory system, and we will understand our own role in helping it to flow.

Stu Weiss and I are strolling at Edgewood Park and Preserve, a bucolic swath of greenery just south of San Francisco in San Mateo County, California. Here, Weiss and his fellow scientists from the Creekside Center for Earth Observation aid and abet the citizenry in helping to resuscitate populations of the Bay Checkerspot Butterfly and the San Mateo Thornmint, both endangered species. Weiss’s team has laid out a transect in which they are counting up thornmint stalks. Their focus on the sparse plants is so close, they look like surgeons at a green operating table.

Weiss and I walk over to a hillside facing Interstate 280, the very road by which I had travelled to meet him. Cars wing endlessly past. I used to commute along what some call the most beautiful highway in America, with the Santa Cruz Mountains on the one side and the golden hills on the other. But listening to Weiss tell me about his work here, I realize I have never quite seen this place before.

Weiss points out that behind us the hillside getting full sun “could be Southern California.” There is a tangle of chaparral, sage, chemise and deer wood. Beyond the highway, the mountains are full of oak woodlands and Doug fir. It’s a different microclimate over there. Weiss points out a small smudge of lighter vegetation in the dark green tangles. “There’s a stand of chaparral,” he says. “Ready to take off.”

What I might describe as ample purview for a traditional California landscape painting Weiss sees perhaps as Seurat or Van Gogh would have done. One pretty scene to me is to Weiss a mosaic of geology, vegetation type, aspect in relation to the sun and rainfall, and atmosphere – not only full of too much CO2 but thanks to the steadily streaming cars, too much nitrogen.

And not only does Weiss see the invisible gases, he sees into the future. Weiss and other scientists studying what global change is doing to biodiversity wrangle over the concept of “climate space.” When he says the chaparral are ready to take off, he means that as temperatures rise and the landscape gets drier, much of the mixed hardwood forests we are looking at could disappear, and plants like chaparral could take over. Microclimates result from a myriad of inputs, and these are being reshuffled. The future will be a different picture altogether.

Weiss reminds me that the highway is built along the San Andreas fault line, the result of the two converging tectonic plates, the Farallon and the North American. Some of the resulting rocks from the mash-up of the plates between 35 and 165 million years ago are serpentine – California’s official state rock. Serpentine is why we are standing here. Nutrient-poor, the limitations of serpentine soil have created a refugia for endemic plants and animals, including Plantago erecta, upon which the Bay Checkerspot depends.

The trouble for the Bay Checkerspot right here is the traffic. Nitrogen in the cars’ exhaust actually fertilizes the soil, making it hospitable to the invasive Italian rye grass that grows up higher than the Plantago erecta. Eventually the grass thatches over and suffocates the natives beneath. The butterfly can’t get to its favorite food and perishes.

Oh the world and our woes! But there is a solution, here, and Weiss figured it out. “Grazing and mowing,” he says, simply. In other beleaguered Bay Checkerspot habitat Weiss has successfully argued for cattle grazing to keep the rye grass low enough that the native flowers can get some space. This piece of habitat is too small for cattle so the county mows it once a year. “It’s really like gardening,” says Weiss. “You have to take care of each piece of land.” And then the butterflies will come.

Sometimes climate change seems like a downright good idea. The global re-boot of conditions on Earth is a take-all-prisoners phenomenon. Confronting its challenges requires absolutely everybody into the pool. I wondered, for example, at the sheer marvelous variety of the speakers lined up at the Bay Area Open Space Council‘s annual conference last week. Other than perhaps the funeral for a head of state, what other subject brings a two-star Marine general and an Episcopal priest onto the dais?Retired Major General Anthony Jackson spoke about “why nations fight and fail.” The Reverend Canon Sally Bingham spoke about “choosing life over death and destruction.” The God of War and the God of Love may ordinarily rule separate hemispheres but under global change, the whole celestial sphere is at issue, and these two leaders know it.

The Bay Area Open Space Council is one of my favorite organizations. Its very structure and purpose pursue the goal of “collective impact” that was the topic for this year’s conference. Over the past several years, a paper from the Stanford Social Innovation Review has percolated through the nonprofit community. “Collective Impact” poses a fairly simple paradigm: small groups working under the rubric of a common cause directed by an organizing entity can achieve social reform at the scale necessary to make a difference. I read this paper with glee when it came out, because it articulates exactly what the landscape initiative called The Spine of the Continent is all about. A tiny nonprofit, Wildlands Network, keeps its hand on the pulse of more than 40 organizations ranged along the Rockies, to help them coordinate efforts to achieve connectivity between natural areas. The Spine of the Continent is a great example of “collective impact,” because without such coordination, not only the effort will fail, but nature will fail.

As I wander through the land of environmental nonprofits, I’m always asking myself: what works? Because on one level, nothing is working. Every year more land and water is converted to human use. The engines of what literary critic Leo Marx calls “the Faustian drive” are stoked and fanned by what has become an increasingly disconnected and lethal passion for more. Fantastic organizations and people at the helms of land trusts and science-based research institutions and nonprofits are doing truly indispensable work to target and protect critical swaths of land and water – but they will never keep pace with the Faustian lust for development. It will take a critical mass of individuals having an “aha” moment about what we need to do here, and then holding hands and doing it, to stem the destruction. That’s why I like citizen science so much – it’s all about collective impact. Collective impact depends on multiple single hearts turning, impelling multiple hands to stretch out and work together.

The panel I moderated at the conference was a case study of where collective impact is at these days and where it needs to go. Kristeen Penrod unveiled a tremendous effort she spear-headed, “Bay Area Critical Linkages,” a book-size document that tells where and how to achieve connectivity here. Wendy Eliot talked about the door-to-door, muddy-knees approach to actually getting a single corridor protected in Sonoma County. And Kirk Lenington talked about an even more precisely geo-located effort to support underpasses and culverts down the Peninsula to allow mountain lions to keep on trucking without getting hit by them. Lenington’s mountain lions have to be connected with areas similar to the one Eliot is working in, which in turn have to be safely nestled within a larger matrix such as delineated in Penrod’s tome. What the Bay Area Open Space Council does so well is to create a community setting for these people to share knowledge and war stories. For their own work to succeed, their colleagues’ work has to succeed. They have to hold hands to get their work done.

General Jackson reminded the audience that again and again great civilizations have risen based on exploiting resources. Then they exhaust the substance of their vitality, and fall. “Now we study their bones,” he said. The Reverend Bingham called climate change “the most important moral issue of our day.” She said that caring for creation is “God’s work.” And we would do well to remember that there’s another fellow up at bat here, promising us the same things he offered Faust: riches, ease, power and control. We think we can follow him just so far, and that we will step off his golden conveyor belt in time to save our own souls. Both the general and the priest stare this fellow down and we would do well to take a closer look at his identity as well.

We tend to think of the things of man and the things of nature as separate. The way we categorize say waterfalls, mountains, and birds as existing in a realm apart from furniture, paintings, and clothing could supply a generation’s worth of doctoral dissertations. One place where “natural” and “cultural” come together in an institutional embrace is the National Park System (NPS). The NPS has intertwined duties to steward both the natural and the cultural resources in our protected areas. Salmon are nature but have a central cultural role for indigenous peoples. The remnants of ancient settlements were built by humans but have become features of landscape.

I was thinking about the beauty and example of this responsibility while Kim Besom, curator of the museum at Grand Canyon, gave me a tour of some of its treasures. Grand Canyon is a gigantic empty space, no? No. Things have come in and out of it, people, animals, artifacts. The museum at Grand Canyon isn’t a place of display as you might expect, but a series of rooms with oddball things in it. Including dung from prehistoric giant sloths. These sloths were about 8 feet tall at the shoulder. (The remains of giant ground sloths in L.A.’s La Brea tar pits are 10-12 feet tall.) Why save the dung? We can see what they ate in it. It helps us build a bit of a story around what their world looked like, how they lived.

Besom showed me some prime bones from her “Quaternary collection.” The Quaternary is a geological epoch that includes the Pleistocene from which the sloth slunk forth and the Holocene, to which we now belong — though some have called for a renaming of our era to Anthropocene, to reflect the impact Homo sapiens is currently having on even the geological cycle. It would appear we are breaking the back of time itself.

Among Besom’s other treasures are the long-fanged top of a jaw thought to be a mountain lion until Jim Mead, from nearby Northern Arizona University, suggested it is probably from the now extinct American cheetah. Besom showed me trays of beautiful “split twig figures” that are 3-5,000 years old. For many years these were the earliest evidence of humans at Grand Canyon. They look like well-made childrens’ toys, but some of them have drops of dung (again!) inside them, indicating their use in hunting rituals. “They hardly look their age,” Besom remarked with fondness. More recently evidence of Clovis and Folsom spear points have been added to her collection – some of these peoples evidently roamed these lands more than 10,000 years ago. The Clovis are credited with hunting many of the giant Pleistocene animals to extinction.

“We look at this pottery like it was no big deal for early people to make it,” Besom told me, showing me gorgeous bowls (“this one is for the fancy dinner parties”). “But it was a very big deal. People had to travel to get the good clay. They had to travel sometimes 100 miles to gather wood to fire it when they had deforested the area close to their settlement.” While there is no doubt Native American peoples have had a much more salubrious relationship with the things of nature than Anglos have, there is plenty of evidence that tribes exhausted resources just like Europeans-Americans did/do.

Closer to the present day, but still tucked well behind the scrim of history, are Besom’s artifacts related to John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War general who famously first mapped the Colorado Plateau. Powell’s watch from his second trip down the Colorado River sits handsome and large on a temperature-controlled shelf. “People have called to ask what time it is stopped on,” Besom told me. “I have to remind them that he didn’t die the minute the watch stopped.” She also has a piece of burnt wood that is apparently a piece of one of Powell’s boats, the only extant remnant of the arks that carried him down the Colorado River. By the way, he strapped himself to a rocking chair on his boat. Well, why not. Even the oldest thing in Besom’s collection barely registers on the time-scale evidenced by Grand Canyon itself. Powell had his moment in history – and evidently knew how to enjoy the ride.